> restaurant menus
Out of all the examples you have presented everything had worked somehow without phones not so long ago.
Maybe, with the exception of online public transit status streaming. And public transit still works without it.
On the occasions where I've been to a restaurant that tries to pull off the QR nonsense, I just ask for a menu, I tell them I don't have a phone.
I've yet to see one where they can't find me an actual menu. If it ever happens, I'll walk out and be very annoyingly loud at letting them know why they lost my business.
Pushing for your rights isn't always pleasant, but it's important.
This is called change :-) Slowly boiling the frogs.
Things like paid surface parking lots. Used to you could pay at a machine or a lot attendant, well there aren’t attendants anymore and few people use the machines so there isn’t enough incentive to fix them when they’re vandalized.
Some restaurants have printed backup menus but some straight up don’t. Printing menus costs money, why spend it if they don’t have to?
Digital signage that tells you how far away transit is, whether there are currently adjusted times, etc. is a lower priority now that everyone has maps in their pocket that track the transit in real time.
Showing up to a concert early to convince the ticket window to give you a physical ticket for a digital only event, and then they want email proof or to visibly see an app on the smartphone that is glitching is ridiculous.
The list of tiny cuts goes on and on. All of them worked without smartphones but the incentives flipped and now you can’t escape and you don’t realize the backups are gone until you try it for a while. It sucks.
I can and have gone days without a phone in “semirural” areas (not even Amish) and have been fine.
Restaurants without printed menus are just not places I’ll go.
Tbh I see no reason why all of that couldn't just be a website instead of a native app. Menus should just be a website, transit should still be offering physical metro cards, the lockers & bikes could just as easily be a website.
Folks on HN won't like this ida but quite frankly I'd go a step further and have a mandate that services like these must offer an API for the public to use in order to bring their own app/solution. It'd be nice to not be limited to exclusively first party options. How ridiculous is it that there are so many different pay for parking apps, when if all of them just offered an API I could roll my one all in one parking web app, etc.
I'd even pay a subscription, like many of these services offer already, for API access instead.